Science Education

The Status of Science Education in Bay Area Elementary Schools

Science is being squeezed out of early elementary grades in northern California schools, a finding that echoes similar worries about the loss of teaching time in that subject nationwide, a study suggests.

The study—conducted by the Lawrence Hall of Science, a K-12 research center at the University of California, Berkeley, and WestEd, a nonprofit research organization based in San Francisco—found that 80 percent of K-5 elementary school teachers report spending a total of 60 minutes or less per week on science, and that 16 percent said they spend no time at all on the subject. That amount of time, the researchers note, is considerably less than the 125 minutes per week that elementary science teachers reported spending on science in a separate 2002 study by Chapel Hill, N.C.-based Horizon Research Inc.